


Sixteen White Rabbits

by orphan_account



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Adult Situations, Eating Disorders, Insecurity, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 01:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2673713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Big Shell incident, when Snake's bones began to ache in the early mornings, he started counting in a different manner.  He began counting everything around him so he would stop counting down his days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Time and Time Again

Man has a nasty habit of counting time. Clocks, watches, calendars – every single one designed to keep track of every moment of a person's life. Schedules, countdowns, conversations. Man is controlled by time, and there is truth in the idea that the awareness of time is what separates humankind from animals.

For Snake, time was a sharp, crystal-clear reminder of many things. Time lost, the time before his next mission, the time waiting for wounds to heal or memories to fade. Mainly it reminded him of the unwelcome silver streaks through his hair, his aching back and the new, horribly soft tremors in his hands. Those, he hated the most. 

He actively avoided the bright red numbers and blocked out the soft ticking, turning his head to purposefully ignore the documented proof of the days steadily moving by. He would go days without looking at the time, but could always give it accurately when asked. It was a skill the mercenary developed over decades, unconsciously counting the seconds and minutes and hours. Reading the tilt of the shadows and the color of the sun against the walls. Every subtle change in the day alluded to everything Snake was trying to ignore. 

On the battlefield, it was a priceless tactic, and was one of Snake's most effective abilities. Learning the cycle of guards and their breaks and utilizing the threadbare seconds in between a shift change. He'd memorize the slow swivel of a security camera, the minute and forty-two seconds it took the machine to survey the entire area and the eighteen seconds a chaff grenade blocked the feeds. The four seconds for his codec to connect to Otacon's system and the twenty-eight it took for the engineer to upload a facility's layout to his radar.

The technique was one of the things that made Snake an effective soldier, and would eventually become his prison. In the silence and stillness of the night, there were few things Snake could do to to ease his memories of the battlefield. He could forget the injuries and ignore the scars, and it didn't take him long to distract himself from the worst parts. But counting the time never left him. Again and again, he replayed in his mind the six seconds it took him to pull a new magazine from the holster on his leg and reload, and he imagined scenarios in which he could do it quicker. How to move just a little but more effectively, to trim fractions of a second off. 

Trying to block them out, he often began counting. Not counting the moments in between pulling the trigger and metal hitting flesh, just numbers. Plain numbers without meaning. _One, two, three, four_... In the rare occasions Otacon slept next to him, he would count the rhythmic breathing of the engineer, the lightly visible pulse on his pale neck or the light freckles that were scattered across the smaller man's shoulders. Mostly he slept alone, and couldn't count fast enough to match the rapid typing of code from down the hall. So he would count slowly, and be well into the thousands before sleep could claim him.

After the Big Shell incident, when Snake's bones began to ache in the early mornings and his back began to fail him, he started counting in a different manner. He began counting everything around him so he would stop counting down his days. 

He began counting his family. Otacon, and the thirty-four times in a day he adjusted his glasses. The six cups of coffee he drank and the forty-one individual sips he took. Sunny, and all the times she pulled her hair or sleeves in her nervous manner and each time she laughed or smiled directly at Snake. He loved counting those the most.

He obsessively counted everything they did so he could forget to count himself.

Eventually, he began to realize there was one thing about Otacon he couldn't really count. It took him a few days to realize what was missing, and after he did he was annoyed with himself that he didn't think of it before. As Snake ran a shaking hand down Otacon's chest and stomach, he counted his ribs. 

_One, two, three..._

A heavy pit of unease coiled deep within Snake's stomach as he realized his mind slowly came to the conclusion that he didn't count Otacon's meals.

He felt slightly dizzy as he thought over the last week, and how many time's he'd actually seen Otacon eat. _One, two meals_? Their sleep schedules had never really coincided, so it was possible Otacon ate while Snake was sleeping. Blinking slowly, he gazed at his partner below him. Otacon's pale skin was flushed in the low light, panting softly and squirming now that Snake had stilled. His ribs were sickly visible and his stomach dipped slightly. Snake ran his fingertips over his partner's wrists, grimacing at how small and fragile they seemed.

“Otacon,” Snake whispered gruffly, “when did you last eat?”

“W-What? Uh, yesterday, maybe?”

Snake sighed softly, his eyes narrowing at the befuddled scientist. Slipping off the bed, the soldier padded softly towards the hallway. The springs of their shared mattress complained as Otacon sat up, clearly confused and somewhat hurt.

“Snake, what are you doing?”

Snake didn't answer, towards their seldom-used-yet-somehow-still-dirty kitchen, thankful for not having yet removed his pants and that Sunny's door was closed, and he presumed her asleep. As to not disturb her, Snake quietly pulled a box of macaroni and cheese from the cabinet and began searching for a pan. As he filled the pan with water and placed it on the stove, he heard footsteps and the gentle rustle of cloth behind him. He ignored Otacon's soft questions as the water began to boil, but turned slightly to glance at him.

Standing in the kitchen entryway, wrapped in a sheet, Otacon looked very small and very upset. His face was still flushed from their interrupted endeavors, and his eyes shone with the promise of tears. The sheet, which Otacon called peach and Snake called cat-vomit, was wrapped tightly around his frame just under his prominent collarbone.

Disgusted, the mulleted man turned back to the stove and started the counter, hating himself for not counting one thing that actually mattered. He watched the seconds begin to slip, _7:58... 7:57... 7:56..._.

It seemed, for Snake, time consumed his life.

For Otacon, time did not exist.


	2. Learning to Swim

For some people, time is the most important thing there is. Sometimes people have too much, but mostly not enough. Running late, a deadline, crossing off days on a calendar. Always, always counting. 

Otacon didn't believe he was one of those people. He never kept calendars and rarely thought about deadlines, and had never had much of a steady sleep cycle, staying awake far into the early morning and sleeping just a few restless hours at a time. His father had once told him his internal clock was set wrong, and Otacon mainly agreed. 

For him, time was more of an abstract concept. He could stare at a clock and read the numbers, or watch the hands slow tick away, without grasping exactly _what_ time it was, because it never really mattered. The passage of time was never relevant to the engineer, and the seconds always seemed to blur into minutes into hours which blurred into days and weeks. Otacon could remember many occasions of seeing the sunrise after what he believed to be just moments of coding. He would often shrug and close the blinds, shutting the world out and to return to his computer screen.

He had always been this way. Forgoing meals, showers, sleep for the sake of productivity. He would wave away Sunny's carefully (yet poorly) prepared meals with, “ _Not quite right now, I'm on a roll,_ ” and a good-natured laugh. The addition of Sunny to their small family had definitely helped his broken patterns, as he no longer went weeks without showering and ate a little more steadily. She was quiet but fierce when she wanted to be, and she'd only had to unplug his power strip once to get her message across. 

Still, he could lose himself for hours into his work without once looking away from the lines of complicated coding across his screen. His fingers slipped over the keys steadily, eyes flicking as he searched for errors and bugs, but never down to the time on the monitor. Breaks often came in the form of Sunny asking him to help with the Mk. II, and he began assuming she didn't actually need help when he found a “bug” in the coding that was actually just some electrical tape loosely wrapped around a circuit. He appreciated her concern, patted her soft platinum hair and returned to his work station.

Snake sometimes mentioned how the engineer would stumble around like a zombie, and how pale he'd been looking. Otacon would smile and lean against his chest, sagging with dizziness as exhaustion finally hit him. He'd never passed out, although he'd come close.

Otacon liked coding for a lot of the same reasons he liked anime – it was a good escape from things in his life, and always had been. Coding, however, was something that produced, and it made him feel slightly atoned for the horrors he'd created at Shadow Moses. His guilt, which had pooled deep within his gut a long time ago, was eased slightly as he typed out things that could actually _help_ someone. Creating new programs for Philanthropy, developing databases and modifying nanomachines or equipment that could help Snake on the battlefield. Everything he could do to make the world slightly better made it easier to breathe. Yet guilt brought on by tragedy is not always easy to contain, and when the burden became too heavy to bear, he let himself forget about time. About the time he wasted creating a monster, and the little time Snake had left to fix it.

Snake ignored his aching joints and his increasing difficulty with breathing, and Otacon could pretend he didn't see it. The guilt of what he'd done would come back in waves, choking Otacon and nearly drowning him at times. He had always known it would happen, but was never prepared for how helpless he would feel, and how hard the knowledge of it being _his doing_ would hit him.

“It's not your fault,” Snake had told him once, simply. He'd shrugged and walked away, leaving Otacon gasping for breath as coldness began to wrap around his heart and compress, making him shiver as he realized it was _most definitely his fault_.

So he immediately stopped thinking about how much time was left, and began pouring himself into his coding. If he could think of some way to program something to slow it down, or just something better to protect Snake on the battlefield, he could fix this. He could fix this, somehow, if he tried hard enough and did something or created something but _he could fix this._

To Otacon, time became meaningless. The first gentle rays of sun meant as little as the last bleeding ones and he began turning Sunny's meals down more often. _If I have time to eat, I'm not trying hard enough._

When the ache in his stomach turned from sadness to real emptiness, he focused harder on his coding. Eventually he found it easier to disconnect himself from the pangs of hunger, and could concentrate hard enough to stop feeling them altogether. He slept when the lines on the screen blurred together and his hands simply stopped responding, and that worked. It became a steady routine, and he ignored the dizzy spells and constant shivering that came with it. 

_If Snake can put up with a little bit of shaking, so can I._

He was content with this cycle, the feeling of hunger helping to replace the guilt and sadness that had plagued him for so long. He was content to forget about time and imagine it hadn't passed. That Sunny wasn't getting taller or outgrowing her clothes, and that there weren't any extra wrinkles on Snake's face or that his gait was still steady and his eyes weren't having trouble focusing on smaller print. No, nothing had changed at all.

“Snake, _please!_ What's wrong?”

Otacon stood, lightheaded and cold, in the entryway of their small kitchen. He pulled the sheet he had clutched tightly in his fists closer around him, and felt his throat closing up as he watched Snake turn to glance at him. He swallowed back tears, feeling like his partner's sharp gaze could break him.

_Everything was going fine... What did I do wrong?_

“Sit down.”

Otacon blinked, startled at the soft words, and it took a moment to register what Snake had said. He staggered to the small table, feeling weak with relief as he collapsed into one of the mismatched chairs. Feeling empty and completely perplexed, Otacon stared at the wooden tabletop, tracing the swirling patterns as he tried to understand what had happened to make everything go so wrong.

He felt as though just a few moments went by when a bowl of garishly bright macaroni was pushed into his view. He slowly raised his gaze to Snake, standing beside him. The older man wore a look of frustration on his face, and Otacon felt his stomach fill with remorse as he dropped his gaze back to the bowl.

“Eat it, Otacon.”

The scientist stilled, his heartbeat a rapid roaring in his ears. _Eat? No._ Shaking visibly, he untangled a hand from the sheet twisted around him and gently pushed the bowl away. His gaze snapped up to meet Snake's as it was pushed back towards him. 

“I don't want it,” the smaller man said through gritted teeth. “I'm not hungry.”

“Eat it anyway,” Snake snapped, impatience flaring in his dark eyes. 

Otacon's stomach turned as the bowl was again pushed closer to him, the artificial smell of cheese making his head spin. His stomach twisted again and he felt like retching. “I don't want it,” he repeated.

Snake said nothing.

Otacon burst into tears. 

He felt Snake's arms wrap around him and crush him to his chest. Sobs racking his small frame, he tried to push the mercenary away, his heart beating hard against his ribcage. Snake relaxed his grip enough to avoid harming him, but when Otacon's hysterical bawling turned into soft whimpers, he pulled him out of the chair and into his lap. They sat on the cool tiles of the kitchen for what seemed like an eternity to Otacon, but was two hundred and thirty-one seconds for Snake. 

Snake ran his hand through Otacon's tangled hair gently and kissed the top of his head, rubbing the smaller man's back as the last of his hiccups faded. The engineer buried his face in his partner's neck, relishing the heat that came from his tanned skin.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered hoarsely. “I'm so sorry for everything I did to you.”

“You didn't do anything,” came the muffled reply. “But you did scare me.”

Otacon slowly pushed away, enough to tip his head back and look at Snake. “I scared you?” When Snake nodded, he let out a soft bark of laughter. “Nothing scares you, Snake. You're the shit.”

Snake rolled his eyes, concern fading into annoyance at Otacon's favorite compliment. “ _You_ scare me, walking around like you don't see anything and not eating like this. You can't weigh more than one-twenty, while wet.” 

Otacon lowered his gaze, shame burning across his face. Lowering his head back to Snake's chest, he closed his eyes as his head spun again. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled. He listened to the steady beat of Snake's heart and heard him sigh.

“I just want you to be healthy. Sunny needs you, and so do I.”

The unspoken implication made Otacon wince.

“Please, work with me.” Snake twisted his fingers into Otacon's hair, tugging slightly to bring his head back. Snake's eyes brimmed with concern as he searched the smaller man's face, his mouth pulling into a slight pout when he didn't immediately respond.

The grip on Otacon's heart loosened a fraction as he gazed into the face of the man he loved, the man he knew loved him back. “I think it's about time.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a prompt i received Anonymously on my tumblr, kriwufics. I'm hoping to complete it with one or maybe two chapters in the next few days. (☌ᴗ☌)
> 
> 11/26 edit || I decided to only do two chapters and I'll MAYBE add one to another unfinished fic tomorrow. Thank you guys for your support, and make sure to ask for something you'd like to see! (๑ˇ₃ˇ๑)


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